Repro justice folks: do you have Brackeen v. Haaland on your radar? This case will rule on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act. It impacts the rights of Native families to parent their children & the rights of Native children to grow up in Native homes. ICWA works to ensure that Native children who are relinquished by or removed from their families are kept within their kinship circle, tribe, or other Native families. It was passed in 1978 to begin countering prolonged histories of coercive, abusive, assimilative child-taking.

Reporters! Some very basic information about adoption and tips on how to cover it. I have seen all of these points misrepresented or ignored in recent reporting. 🧵 1) The government doesn’t count private adoptions. (I don’t know why; there is no good reason. Researchers have been complaining for decades.) There are about 18-22k private domestic infant adoptions per year, or 0.5% of births.

Look, the NYT seems to want us to just bring back Dickensian foundling wheels rather than actually having a meaningful social safety net for new parents in crisis.

Safe haven boxes are dangerous.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1555983320856629248

These boxes are almost never used (there were 7 safe haven abandonments in the entire state of TX in 2021), and we know almost nothing about the extreme situations in which they are.

The NSRC is talking about encouraging adoption.

SCOTUS is worried about the "supply of infants" available for adoption.

Time for me to recenter the voices of the mothers behind adoption in the United States today, and how they were "encouraged" to consider adoption. 🧵 Erin had two children and as newly divorced, when she got pregnant after a "rebound" relationship in 2019. Here is part of her story:

"I had postpartum depression with my other two kids, and with this one too. It's just so much more painful than anybody can even imagine."

You'll remember during the oral arguments for Dobbs, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that infant relinquishment through safe-havens and domestic adoption averted the need for abortion. She was wrong, of course. What does the leaked opinion say? 🧵

washingtonpost.com/outlook/barret… To start, the leaked opinion suggests that the establishment of safe-haven laws in "all 50 states and the District of Columbia" have been an important policy change that is relevant to the question of abortion access.

Adoption Marketing, Part II: How Adoption/Babies Are Sold to Prospective Parents 🧵

CW: This may be uncomfortable/triggering for adoptees.

Part I looked at how relinquishment is marketed to pregnant people, and is here:

https://twitter.com/gesisson/status/1501561472261910529

Again, my primary area of research is looking at experiences of relinquishment (not marketing, not adoptive family experiences) so welcome others adding their own experience/expertise. I *have* studied experiences of infertility before & I will draw on that somewhat.

Adoption Marketing, Part I: How Relinquishment Is Sold to Pregnant Women 🧵

These are some high level thoughts based on what I've found in my research on private adoption; marketing is *not* the primary focus of my work.

This will be extremely long. There are many others (adoptees, birth/first parents, researchers) who have expertise here, and I'll be sharing links as I can and invite others to chime in. Again, this isn't my primary area of research so I have plenty to learn here, too, and hope this can be a conversation.

SCOTUS is talking a lot about adoption, so here's what the data show. An extremely quick thread. 🧵

The vast majority of people who want abortions are not meaningfully interested in adoption. If they are denied access to abortion 91% of them will parent instead of relinquishing. However, this 9% is huge. Only 0.5% of all birth in the U.S. are relinquished, so this a dramatic difference. If you deny access to abortion, if you constrain choices, people will turn to adoption because they have no option.

🧵 November is National #Adoption Awareness Month. Adoption should be safe (mentally, emotionally, physically for adopted people & birth parents), legal (with protections for everyone involved), & rare (if we are supporting pregnant people and families as we should). #NAAM Domestic adoption is largely rooted in the resourcelessness and powerless of first/birth families. This will be a 🧵 with direct quotes from the women I interviewed for my current book project; I’ll add to it throughout November. All of these participants relinquished since 2000.